The present invention relates to an apparatus for operating a medical appliance, in particular a moving operating table. More specifically, the invention relates to an apparatus for operating a medical appliance having a touchscreen on which a user interface is displayed, wherein the user interface has a number of first buttons for initiating first actions of the medical appliance.
The use of touchscreens for operating and controlling appliances has become widespread, particularly in the medical sector. A touchscreen is a screen or, more generally, a display unit having a touch-sensitive surface. A touchscreen therefore allows the pictorial representation of (virtual) buttons, the touching of which by a user can be recognized and evaluated. A touchscreen can therefore be used to implement very flexible input devices, which can also be operated very easily and intuitively.
For many appliances, particularly in the medical sector, however, an especially reliable and secure operation is required. Thus, by way of example, it must be possible to control the movement of an electric operating table very reliably in order to put a seriously injured patient carefully into a desired position. In this context, it must be ensured that the movement of the operating table can be reliably stopped again at any time. This characteristic, which at first glance is obvious, is not readily assured with known touchscreens. This is because it cannot be ruled out that the touchscreen's button will “freeze” after it has been actuated, i.e. that a malfunction in the touchscreen will cause release of the touch-sensitive button to be no longer registered. If the button has been used to start the operating table moving in such a case, the touchscreen can no longer be used to stop the movement. For this reason, critical actions on medical appliances, i.e. actions which have to be performed with a very high degree of reliability, have not solely been controlled using touchscreens so far. In some cases, such actions have been controlled entirely without a touchscreen, or the touchscreen has been complemented by an additional “real” emergency-off switch, as in the case of the apparatus mentioned at the outset.
However, the addition of an emergency-off switch requires additional wiring and also some work on the hardware of commercially available touchscreens. This is a drawback in respect of the manufacturing costs of prior art apparatuses, and also in respect of operating convenience.
An alternative option of providing reliable and failsafe control with a touchscreen involves that the individual control operations each are executed only for a predetermined, limited period of time when the button is actuated. This ensures that, by way of example, the movement of the operating table is stopped after the predetermined period of time has elapsed, even if the button on the touchscreen freezes due to a failure which has occurred in the interim. However, such a solution adversely affects operating convenience. Furthermore, it is then very difficult to set an exact position for the operating table with high precision.